LinkedIn has become an integral part of many business and professional processes and practices, including recruitment, job search, and business-to-business marketing. If you’re looking for a job, looking to recruit online, or looking to find clients in the business world, LinkedIn is for you. But it’s not the only place you want to be.
In addition to having LinkedIn pages, businesses will often have a website. With lots of business themes to enhance the look and business plugins to add functionality, it’s easy to understand why WordPress is a common choice for a business website.
Professionals can also use websites to fill gaps left by LinkedIn and create online portfolios. Websites can also earn money for their owners, making them a potential side business or even a main business. Either way, someone who owns both LinkedIn and a website might want to connect them in some way, and the LinkedIn badge is used for exactly that.
In this article, we will show you:
A LinkedIn badge is exactly what its name says – A badge you can add to your website that should display LinkedIn’s logo, profile photo, name, and title. Finally, it should also include a button that people can use to access your LinkedIn profile. The badge is available in both light and dark mode.
The main reason for adding a LinkedIn badge to your website is to let your website visitors know they can find you on LinkedIn and to provide them with a fast and efficient way to do it.
All would be great if it weren’t for the fact that most of the time the badge doesn’t work as it should. Instead of seeing the picture, you can simply access your LinkedIn profile with your name as a link and anchor text.
It seems that this is not always the case – in some cases the badge may display correctly. That’s why we’re going to show you how to add the badge using the method LinkedIn suggested, plus there are a few things you can try if it doesn’t work. Unfortunately, you won’t be able to use a plugin to fix this, as the most popular plugin for adding LinkedIn profile information to WordPress has been rendered unusable by a LinkedIn API restriction.
The recommended way to create a LinkedIn badge and add it to your website has changed over time. We will show you the version of the instructions in May 2021. Please note that your profile must have public visibility “on” for this to work.
To get started, go to your LinkedIn profile page. From there, click on the Edit public profile and URL link. You will find this in the upper right corner of the page.
This will take you to your public profile settings. There, you’ll be able to set your profile’s public visibility to public – which, as we mentioned earlier, is a requirement for this method to work – and then scroll to the bottom of the page. In the lower right corner, you will find the Public Profile badge shortcut.
Clicking the “Create badge” button will take you to the Public profile badge generator. The page where you’ll get the instructions and code for attempting to create a functioning LinkedIn profile badge.
The first step you need to do is take the provided script and post it anywhere on your page.
One way to safely add code to your WordPress website is to inject it into the header using the code. Header, Footer and Post Injections plugin. We have already created a tutorial on how this plugin works so you can check it out. Short version – install and activate, Settings > Header and FooterClick and paste the code in the first field you see.
Now you can proceed to the step where you choose which version of the badge you want to display and how large you want it to be.
Once done, you can add the code to your website in a few different ways. You can use the Classic Editor plugin and add it as text to any of your posts and pages. Moreover Appearance > Widgets or Appearance > Customize > WidgetsClick and add the code as a widget using custom text or custom HTML widgets. If you choose to include the code on a page or post, you must do so for each page separately. With a widget you can have it in the footer or sidebar of every page or post.
You’re done with this. If you are lucky – at least as luck seems to be the deciding factor rather than officially sanctioned factors – you will get a full badge on your website. Otherwise, it will be a hyperlink to your profile with your name as the link text. Not impressive at all.
If you’re stuck with a linked non-LinkedIn badge, it’s pretty reasonable to be disappointed. You are free to experiment with different ways of adding the code to your website. You can skip the header and footer injector and only add the first line of code to a page. You can add the second line of code as a widget or directly on a page. You can completely eliminate the first line of code – We tried all possible combinations and got the same frustration you get when you encounter a feature that looks broken but is otherwise decent.
But you must not give up so easily – There are still some neat(ish) solutions you can use to add a LinkedIn badge or equivalent to your website.
For example, you can use the Buttons block in the block editor to add a button.
Next, enter the text you want for the button (we used My LinkedIn Profile) and don’t forget to add a link to your LinkedIn profile. We also set it to open in a new tab.
And just like that, you’ll get a button that will direct people to your LinkedIn profile. However, you may need to repeat this method for each page or post.
For a nicer solution, you can get these images from LinkedIn and link them to your LinkedIn profile. Go ahead and get one of the two recommended badge images. Then add them to the media library and then to the block using the image block.
Once complete, you’ll get a fully clickable image that will redirect anyone who clicks it to your LinkedIn profile. Not as elegant as the original badge, but still not bad.
Finally, if you want a solution that works on all pages, you need to create an image widget and add it to the header, footer or sidebar. go to either Appearance > Customize > Widgets or Appearance > Widgets. Add an image widget to the sidebar, footer or header of your choice.
Note that when you add the image, you also choose where it will link and where it will appear. Link to your LinkedIn picture and choose any of the visibility options.
When you’re done, you’ll probably have the next best thing to having a working LinkedIn badge on your WordPress website.
Let’s wrap it up!
No matter how useful the LinkedIn badge is to your website – or nice to have – the fact that its implementation is buggy at best and corrupt at worst makes it less useful. Convenience is important, and people shouldn’t jump through many hoops just to bring traffic to a website, especially when getting traffic is the way websites in general work.
Still, you might be one of the lucky ones as the proposed method worked like a charm. If you are not – don’t worry. We’ve listed a few “workarounds” you can use. And if it’s any consolation, at least you’ll have the opportunity to tinker with WordPress and maybe learn something new.
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